One of the important facts on marriage that has not been emphasized in the literature is
the hump-shaped pattern of the prevalence of marriage in the U.S. over the last 100 years.
In this paper, we study the mutual relationship between the demographic structure and the
industrial structure of the economy. As an empirical contribution of the paper, we establish
two facts using cross-country panels; i) the hump-shaped pattern of marriage is observed in the
most of the OECD countries, and ii) the manufacturing share in GDP has a significant positive
correlation with the prevalence of marriage. Given those observations, we propose a model of the
structural change with endogenous household formation. In our model, individuals’ incentives
to marry are affected by the underlying structure of the economy, and the home production
sector is operated by different types of household with different scales. In addition to the ability
of our model to match the pattern of marriage, we show that our model is also able to generate
a pattern of the manufacturing and service shares consistent with the observed data, which the
standard model of structural change fails to generate